Don’t worry, you didn’t miss out on anything of value: the vaguely interesting and aesthetically neat setting is half baked as all hell and gets glossed over with even its core conceit (“you can’t go up lmao”) only ever mattering as much as the author feels like caring about it. I went and did a whole writeup (CW: it’s about Made in Abyss, but all the worst stuff is under a spoiler with clearer CWs) a couple of weeks ago about how awful the show is and spent the next day melting down from the psychic damage. I think this line from that sums it up the best:

The whole experience is that of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a dark fantasy adventure story by someone who is fundamentally vapid and brain poisoned. It’s basically just mimicking genre tropes and trying to bring out emotion through showcasing horrific things, but it fails horribly because to put it bluntly the author is too twisted in his perspective and too aroused by what he wrote to do anything but revel in and whitewash the horror.

Surprisingly(?) the libertarian elements actually got a lot worse after the first season. After a long time I went back to watch it despite the misgivings I have with some of it because of the setting being so interesting, in an ironic parallel to the story itself, and the setting keeps being interesting but Christ the mangaka and the anime director should both be in prison. Paired with the fact that it has a fetish for horror-tragedy that is just really sickening, it’s just a minefield of disturbing elements that is more mine than field.

if you remember the name send it my way please!